CSIRO Winanga-y Postdoctoral Fellowship in Developing Acoustic Technology for Livestock Monitoring

• Do you have a PhD in acoustics, signal processing, engineering, physics or computer science?
• Keen to be involved in providing novel monitoring technology to the farm?
• Great opportunity to be part of a dynamic and vibrant research environment with multi-disciplinary and multi-site connections

CSIRO Early Research Career (CERC) Postdoctoral Fellowships provide opportunities to scientists and engineers who have completed their doctorate and have less than three years of relevant postdoctoral work experience. These fellowships aim to develop the next generation of future leaders of the innovation system.

We are thrilled to be able to deliver on the commitment we made in our strategy to invest in frontier science with the CSIRO Agriculture & Food Winanga-y Postdoctoral Fellowship scheme. The word Winanga-y (pronounced win-na-gnay) is a cultural asset gifted by the Gomeroi Nation in Myall Vale to CSIRO’s Agriculture and Food Business Unit to name the Postdoctoral Fellowship Scheme. Winanga-y means to understand, know, remember, and think.

Livestock farming faces constant scrutiny on animal welfare practices and sustainability, both of which feed into the social license to operate, and into ongoing market access. Societal expectations are changing, becoming increasingly stringent, and this trend is set to continue. The Australian livestock production sector needs to provide evidence of high welfare and sustainability, and evidence of an ongoing commitment to continuous improvement in these areas.

This project aims to provide novel monitoring technology to the farm, providing objective monitoring tools that currently don’t exist; based on monitoring approaches that at best are applied in a haphazard manner because of the cost associated with manual assessment, and considered inherently untrustworthy due to their subjective nature. This provides Agribusiness, government and farmers will have a robust and objective means of measuring and setting standards aimed at improving environmental and ethical (animal welfare) outcomes.

Objective measures of biodiversity will also be required into the future as evidence for various sustainability related credentials, and as a meant to monitor the outcomes of changed practices or novel sustainability interventions.

The CERC Fellow will bring an acoustic analysis approach to align with existing projects focussed on the classification and interpretation of animal behaviour using inertial sensors or image analysis. Collaboration across disciplines will ensure rich learning opportunities. There are multiple applications possible, and the CERC Fellow will be expected to shape and direct the direction of the project in consultation with the supervisory team.